Computer Sciences Commons^™

Radish: A Cross Platform Meal Prepping App For Beginner Weightlifters, Spoorthy S. Vemula, Tanay Gottigundala, Cory Baxes

Computer Science and Software Engineering

With the increasing ease of access and decreasing price of most food, obesity rates in the developing world have risen dramatically in recent years. As of March 23rd, 2019, obesity rates had reached 39.6%, a 6% increase in just 8 years. Research has shown that people with obesity have a significantly increased risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers, among other life-threatening diseases. In addition, 42% of people who begin weightlifting quit because it’s too difficult to follow a diet or workout regimen.

We created Radish in an attempt to tackle these problems. Radish makes it …

Evaluating Projections And Developing Projection Models For Daily Fantasy Basketball, Eric C. Evangelista

Master's Theses

Daily fantasy sports (DFS) has grown in popularity with millions of participants throughout the world. However, studies have shown that most profits from DFS contests are won by only a small percentage of players. This thesis addresses the challenges faced by DFS participants by evaluating sources that provide player projections for NBA DFS contests and by developing machine learning models that produce competitive player projections.

External sources are evaluated by constructing daily lineups based on the projections offered and evaluating those lineups in the context of all potential lineups, as well as those submitted by participants in competitive FanDuel DFS …

Snoring: A Noise Defect Prediction Datasets, Aalok Ahluwalia

Master's Theses

Defect prediction aims at identifying software artifacts that are likely to exhibit a defect. The main purpose of defect prediction is to reduce the cost of testing and code review, by letting developers focus on specific artifacts. Several researchers have worked on improving the accuracy of defect estimation models using techniques such as tuning, re-balancing, or feature selection. Ultimately, the reliability of a prediction model depends on the quality of the dataset. Therefore effort has been spent in identifying sources of noise in the datasets, and how to deal with them, including defect misclassification and defect origin. A key component …

Dynamic Shifting Of Virtual Network Topologies For Network Attack Prevention, Lenoy Avidan

Master's Theses

Computer networks were not designed with security in mind, making research into the subject of network security vital. Virtual Networks are similar to computer networks, except the components of a Virtual Network are in software rather than hardware. With the constant threat of attacks on networks, security is always a big concern, and Virtual Networks are no different. Virtual Networks have many potential attack vectors similar to physical networks, making research into Virtual Network security of great importance. Virtual Networks, since they are composed of virtualized network components, have the ability to dynamically change topologies. In this paper, we explore …

A Study Of Face Embedding In Face Recognition, Khanh Duc Le

Master's Theses

Face Recognition has been a long-standing topic in computer vision and pattern recognition field because of its wide and important applications in our daily lives such as surveillance system, access control, and so on. The current modern face recognition model, which keeps only a couple of images per person in the database, can now recognize a face with high accuracy. Moreover, the model does not need to be retrained every time a new person is added to the database.

By using the face dataset from Digital Democracy, the thesis will explore the capability of this model by comparing it with …

Supported Programming For Beginning Developers, Andrew Gilbert

Master's Theses

Testing code is important, but writing test cases can be time consuming, particularly for beginning programmers who are already struggling to write an implementation. We present TestBuilder, a system for test case generation which uses an SMT solver to generate inputs to reach specified lines in a function, and asks the user what the expected outputs would be for those inputs. The resulting test cases check the correctness of the output, rather than merely ensuring the code does not crash. Further, by querying the user for expectations, TestBuilder encourages the programmer to think about what their code ought to do, …

Real-Time Ray Traced Global Illumination Using Fast Sphere Intersection Approximation For Dynamic Objects, Reed Phillip Garmsen

Master's Theses

Realistic lighting models are an important component of modern computer generated, interactive 3D applications. One of the more difficult to emulate aspects of real-world lighting is the concept of indirect lighting, often referred to as global illumination in computer graphics. Balancing speed and accuracy requires carefully considered trade-offs to achieve plausible results and acceptable framerates.

We present a novel technique of supporting global illumination within the constraints of the new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API used with DirectX 12. By pre-computing spherical textures to approximate the diffuse color of dynamic objects, we build a smaller set of approximate geometry used for …

Dish: Democracy In State Houses, Nicholas A. Russo

Master's Theses

In our current political climate, state level legislators have become increasingly impor- tant. Due to cuts in funding and growing focus at the national level, public oversight for these legislators has drastically decreased. This makes it difficult for citizens and activists to understand the relationships and commonalities between legislators. This thesis provides three contributions to address this issue. First, we created a data set containing over 1200 features focused on a legislator’s activity on bills. Second, we created embeddings that represented a legislator’s level of activity and engagement for a given bill using a custom model called Democracy2Vec. Third, we …

Combining Parts Of Speech, Term Proximity, And Query Expansion For Document Retrieval, Lubomir Stanchev, Eric Labouve

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Document retrieval systems recover documents from a database and order them according to their perceived relevance to a user's search query. This is a difficult task for machines to accomplish because there exists a semantic gap between the meaning of the terms in a user's literal query and a user's true intentions. The main goal of this study is to modify the Okapi BM25 document retrieval system to improve search results for textual queries and unstructured, textual corpora. This research hypothesizes that Okapi BM25 is not taking full advantage of the structure of text inside documents. This structure holds valuable …

Polyxpress+: Using Social Networking To Enhance The User Experience Of An Interactive Location-Based Storytelling Application, Desiree Creel

Master's Theses

There’s no denying the ever increasing presence of social networking in our daily lives. Every day, people share what they are thinking, doing, and experiencing. But even more so, they check their favorite networks to see what the people in their lives are sharing. Social networking has become so prevalent that most applications incorporate it since it keeps users engaged and beckons them back to the application again and again.

PolyXpress is an interactive, location-based storytelling mobile application that functions as a platform for creating and experiencing stories. Written as a research project at California Polytechnic State University, it allows …

Eye Pressure Monitior, Andrea Nella Levy

Computer Engineering

The document describes a mobile application that takes information from an attached device which tests eye pressure. The device consists of an IOIO board connected to a custom device that measures the frequency of a given waveform. The device was designed by another student for their senior project, which I am taking over. This device is connected to an IOIO board which is a board designed by a Google employee which works with an android phone in order to create applications that work with embedded systems. The board comes with an API and connects to the phone via a micro-USB. …

Cleaver: Classification Of Everyday Activities Via Ensemble Recognizers, Samantha Hsu

Master's Theses

Physical activity can have immediate and long-term benefits on health and reduce the risk for chronic diseases. Valid measures of physical activity are needed in order to improve our understanding of the exact relationship between physical activity and health. Activity monitors have become a standard for measuring physical activity; accelerometers in particular are widely used in research and consumer products because they are objective, inexpensive, and practical. Previous studies have experimented with different monitor placements and classification methods. However, the majority of these methods were developed using data collected in controlled, laboratory-based settings, which is not reliably representative of real …

Improving Ultra-Wideband Localization By Detecting Radio Misclassification, Cory A. Mayer

Master's Theses

The Global Positioning System (GPS) and other satellite-based positioning systems are often a key component in applications requiring localization. However, accurate positioning in areas with poor GPS coverage, such as inside buildings and in dense cities, is in increasing demand for many modern applications. Fortunately, recent developments in ultra-wideband (UWB) radio technology have enabled precise positioning in places where it was not previously possible by utilizing multipath-resistant wide band pulses.

Although ultra-wideband signals are less prone to multipath interference, it is still a bottleneck as increasingly ambitious projects continue to demand higher precision. Some UWB radios include on-board detection of …

Visualization Of Geospatial Data As An Analytical And Educational Tool, Richard A. Vu

STAR Program Research Presentations

World Wind is an open-source API developed for Java, Android, and browsers that is designed to visualize and interact with geospatial data. The Web World Wind client is composed of four major components: the HTML template, the globe, geospatial features, and application features. The template was implemented using Bootstrap and hosts the globe provided by World Wind. This globe draws its data from multiple imagery sources, including the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service and Web Map Tile Service. This enables the application to perform and visualize complex calculations with multiple types of data such as weather and terrain. …

Cuoricino Thermal Pulse Classification By Machine Learning Algorithms, Joshua Mann

Physics

Many of the various properties of neutrinos are still a mystery. One unknown is whether neutrinos are Majorana fermions or Dirac fermions. Cuoricino and CUORE are experiments that aim to solve this mystery. Noise reduction in these experiments hinges on the ability to discern among alpha, beta and gamma particle detections using the thermal pulses they create. In this paper, we look at Cuoricino data and attempt to classify pulses, not as alpha, beta or gamma particles, but rather as signal, noise or calibration data. We will use this preliminary testing ground to examine various machine learning algorithms' abilities in …

Deaddrop: Message Passing Without Metadata Leakage, Davis Mike Arndt

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Even when network data is encrypted, observers can make inferences about content based on collected metadata. DeadDrop is an exploratory API designed to protect the metadata of a conversation from both outside observers and the facilitating server. To do so, DeadDrop servers are passed no recipient address, instead relying upon the recipient to check for messages of their own volition. In addition, the recipient downloads a copy of every encrypted message on the server to prevent even the server from knowing to whom each message is intended. To these purposes, DeadDrop is mostly successful. However, it does not obscure all …

Finding Spanning Trees In Strongly Connected Graphs With Per-Vertex Degree Constraints, Samuel Benjamin Chase

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this project, I sought to develop and prove new algorithms to create spanning trees on general graphs with per-vertex degree constraints. This means that each vertex in the graph would have some additional value, a degree constraint d. For a spanning tree to be correct, every vertex v_i in the spanning tree must have a degree exactly equal to a degree constraint d_i. This poses an additional constraint on what would otherwise be a trivial spanning tree problem. In this paper, two proofs related to my studies will be discussed and analyzed, leading to my algorithm …

Extractive Text Summarization With Deep Learning, Garrett G. Chan

Computer Engineering

This project explores extractive text summarization using the capabilities of Deep Learning. The goal of this project is to create an application with a neural network to take in text as its input, and create a summary that is a shorter, condensed version of the input text. This has been implemented in Python by configuring and training a neural network that takes in a vector of features that are extracted from the text using various Natural Language Processing libraries. The implementation demonstrates that we can train simple deep neural networks to successfully summarize text.

Raymarching The Mandelbulb Fractal In Vr, Timotheus Alexander Letz

Computer Engineering

Elaborate 3D fractals, such as the mandelbulb, offer fascinating depths and structures that bear self-similarity as one zooms in closer and closer. Traditional rendering techniques focus on pre-rendering the fractal, to bypass the need for real-time display. To display and explore the mandelbulb in VR, this real-time display is needed, and can be provided through the use of “Raymarching”, a technique that allows for the rendering of scenes within the GPU. This paper explores various techniques and systems used to provide, augment, and accelerate this process.

Topographic Maps: Image Processing And Path-Finding, Calin Washington

Master's Theses

Topographic maps are an invaluable tool for planning routes through unfamiliar terrain. However, accurately planning routes on topographic maps is a time- consuming and error-prone task. One factor is the difficulty of interpreting the map itself, which requires prior knowledge and practice. Another factor is the difficulty of making choices between possible routes that have different trade-offs between length and the terrain they traverse.

To alleviate these difficulties, this thesis presents a system to automate the process of finding routes on scanned images of topographic maps. The system allows users to select any two points on a topographic map and …

Funqual: User-Defined, Statically-Checked Call Graph Constraints In C++, Andrew P. Nelson

Master's Theses

Static analysis tools can aid programmers by reporting potential programming mistakes prior to the execution of a program. Funqual is a static analysis tool that reads C++17 code ``in the wild'' and checks that the function call graph follows a set of rules which can be defined by the user. This sort of analysis can help the programmer to avoid errors such as accidentally calling blocking functions in time-sensitive contexts or accidentally allocating memory in heap-sensitive environments. To accomplish this, we create a type system whereby functions can be given user-defined type qualifiers and where users can define their own …

Compiler Optimization Effects On Register Collisions, Jonathan S. Tan

Master's Theses

We often want a compiler to generate executable code that runs as fast as possible. One consideration toward this goal is to keep values in fast registers to limit the number of slower memory accesses that occur. When there are not enough physical registers available for use, values are ``spilled'' to the runtime stack. The need for spills is discovered during register allocation wherein values in use are mapped to physical registers. One factor in the efficacy of register allocation is the number of values in use at one time (register collisions). Register collision is affected by compiler optimizations that …

Analyzing Global Cyber Attack Correlates Through An Open Database, Brady Benjamin Aiello

Master's Theses

As humanity becomes more reliant on digital storage and communication for every aspect of life, cyber attacks pose a growing threat. However, cyber attacks are generally understood as individual incidents reported in technological circles, sometimes tied to a particular vulnerability. They are not generally understood through the macroscopic lens of statistical analysis spanning years over several countries and sectors, leaving researchers largely ignorant of the larger trends and correlates between attacks. This is large part due to the lack of a coherent and open database of prominent attacks. Most data about cyber attacks has been captured using a repository of …

The Effect Of Endgame Tablebases On Modern Chess Engines, Christopher D. Peterson

Computer Engineering

Modern chess engines have the ability to augment their evaluation by using massive tables containing billions of positions and their memorized solutions. This report examines the importance of these tables to better understand the circumstances under which they should be used. The analysis conducted in this paper empirically examines differences in size and speed of memorized positions and their impacts on engine strength. Using this technique, situations where memorized tables improve play (and situations where they do not) are discovered.

Extension Of Cpe 454 Operating System, Joseph Nathaniel Arhar

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This project extended on the operating system I wrote in CPE 454 by adding additional features on top of the existing implementation. In order to implement them, I researched operating system design patterns and hardware details. I used wiki.osdev.org for most research, just like I did in CPE 454. The source code for the project is at https://github.com/josepharhar/jos.

Real-Time Object Removal In Augmented Reality, Tyler Dahl

Master's Theses

Diminished reality, as a sub-topic of augmented reality where digital information is overlaid on an environment, is the perceived removal of an object from an environment. Previous approaches to diminished reality used digital replacement techniques, inpainting, and multi-view homographies. However, few used a virtual representation of the real environment, limiting their domains to planar environments.

This thesis provides a framework to achieve real-time diminished reality on an augmented reality headset. Using state-of-the-art hardware, we combine a virtual representation of the real environment with inpainting to remove existing objects from complex environments.

Our work is found to be competitive with previous …

Influencing Exploration In Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning Algorithms, Andrew R. Gough

Master's Theses

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a subset of machine learning primarily concerned with goal-directed learning and optimal decision making. RL agents learn based on a reward signal discovered from trial and error in complex, uncertain environments with the goal of maximizing positive reward signals. RL approaches need to scale up as they are applied to more complex environments with extremely large state spaces. Inefficient exploration methods cannot sufficiently explore complex environments in a reasonable amount of time, and optimal policies will be unrealized resulting in RL agents failing to solve an environment.

This thesis proposes a novel variant of the Actor-Advantage …

An Empirical Study Of Alias Analysis Techniques, Andrew T. Tran

Master's Theses

As software projects become larger and more complex, software optimization at that scale is only feasible through automated means. One such component of software optimization is alias analysis, which attempts to determine which variables in a program refer to the same area in memory, and is used to relocate instructions to improve performance without interfering with program execution. Several alias analyses have been proposed over the past few decades, with varying degrees of precision and time and space complexity, but few studies have been conducted to compare these techniques with one another, nor to measure with program data to confirm …

Jupyterlab_Voyager: A Data Visualization Enhancement In Jupyterlab, Ji Zhang

Master's Theses

With the emergence of big data, scientific data analysis and visualization (DAV) tools are critical components of the data science software ecosystem; the usability of these tools is becoming extremely important to facilitate next-generation scientific discoveries. JupyterLab has been considered as one of the best polyglot, web-based, open-source data science tools. As the next phase of extensible interface for the classic iPython Notebooks, this tool supports interactive data science and scientific computing across multiple programming languages with great performances. Despite these advantages, previous heuristics evaluation studies have shown that JupyterLab has some significant flaws in the data visualization side. The …

Tessellated Voxelization For Global Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing, Sam Thomas Freed

Master's Theses

Modeling believable lighting is a crucial component of computer graphics applications, including games and modeling programs. Physically accurate lighting is complex and is not currently feasible to compute in real-time situations. Therefore, much research is focused on investigating efficient ways to approximate light behavior within these real-time constraints.

In this thesis, we implement a general purpose algorithm for real-time applications to approximate indirect lighting. Based on voxel cone tracing, we use a filtered representation of a scene to efficiently sample ambient light at each point in the scene. We present an approach to scene voxelization using hardware tessellation and compare …